Numerous mechanical characters whirr and wisecrack their way through The Electric State, a slick Netflix time-killer and money-waster set in the aftermath of a war against the machines. The scariest of a robotic ensemble generally more cuddly than fearsome are also the most emblematic: For the true spirit of this vulturous enterprise, look not to the literal sentient mascots (among them an animatronic Mr. Peanut voiced by Woody Harrelson) but to a pack of feral desert scavengers pieced together from the limbs of other artificially intelligent beings. “Just like Toy Story,” you might absently think – and that’s but one precursor likely to leap to mind while watching a likewise Frankensteined streaming mockbuster begging only to be half-watched. An elevator pitch is easily gleaned from its gleaming assembly of spare parts: What if Starlord and Eleven went on a road trip across the retro-futuristic wasteland of Fallout?

Only by squinting mightily might you see the skeleton of this latest collaboration between the Netflix algorithm and the Hollywood hitmakers most sympathetic to its data-driven whims, Joe and Anthony Russo. The Electric State draws the loosest of inspiration from a 2018 illustrated novel by Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag, who envisioned an alternate 1990s dystopia littered with the remnants of 1950s-style space-age technology and populated by humans experiencing life through a brain-rotting VR headset. Haunting and spare, the book reads like a travelogue of the post-apocalypse, told through starkly diaristic first-person prose and Stålenhag’s painterly vistas of junkyard Americana – of abandoned cybernetic behemoths looming over the loneliest stretches of lost highway.

Little of that survives in the adaptation, which is “based on the book” to the same extent that Mickey Mouse is based on the physiology of a rodent. The Russos take Stålenhag’s singular vision to the chop shop, borrowing an image or two (the crimson glow of server towers, looming in the distant background of shots like canyons or skyscrapers) and discarding the rest. The original plot, in which a young woman embarks on a cross-country drive with a big-headed corporate droid virtually piloted by her little brother, has been cheerily cluttered up with nattering supporting characters. Leave it to the directors of Marvel’s most overstuffed event pictures to bastardize a deeply lonely science fiction yarn into another expensive group hug and team-building comedy routine.

Who better to headline a synthetic Amblin Entertainment than the star of Netflix’s hit exercise in Spielberg cosplay, Stranger Things? To sit through The Electric State is to understand why Millie Bobby Brown, the streaming-era equivalent of a studio contract player, doesn’t watch her own movies. No sooner has her rebellious Michelle gotten on the road with the remote-controlled Kid Cosmo – a walking action figure that communicates exclusively through pre-recorded catchphrases, a little like Sheriff Woody, a little like Bumblebee – than the movie is pairing them off with slovenly fence Keats (Chris Pratt, whose cocky goofball routine is beginning to seem rather pre-recorded itself). Keats has his own metal companion, a trash-talking cutup who adds another naked appeal to MCU fans by being voiced by Anthony Mackie.

Most of the robots in this movie are tireless joke dispensers. They trade quips like language models trained on, well, older Russo brothers blockbusters. A dopey newsreel recap of the film’s Terminator-lite mythology and backstory, featuring some Forrest Gump-like footage of Bill Clinton brokering post-Judgment Day peace talks, traces the invention of artificially intelligent robots to none other than Walt Disney. But lest one think the Russos are biting the hand that usually feeds (and is once more signing their enormous checks), note that these AI-friendly filmmakers are very much on the side of computerkind. The movie floats an irony as old as the Voigt-Kampff test: The more dependent we become on technology, the more the technology will start looking more human than human.

For a film about a postwar hellscape where humans have disappeared into virtual reverie, The Electric State goes down smooth. It blithely races through a premise that really ought to be more troubling. The busy story, concocted by fellow Marvel veterans Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, becomes a long chase, but not in that exciting Mad Max way. To save her lost-in-the-code brother (Woody Norman), Michelle has to track down some exposition-spouters. The heavy, played by Stanley Tucci, wants to keep the world hooked on his digital Ready Player One playground. Tucci delivers much of his dialogue on a screen mounted to a mechanical avatar, as does Giancarlo Esposito as the robot hater/hunter tasked with intercepting our heroes. It might be the most topically resonant aspect of the whole movie: supervillainy via Zoom meeting.

At least the effects look good – and let’s hope so, given the $300 million Netflix spent on them. The Avengers movies the Russos directed sometimes drifted into cartoon weightlessness, with celebrity mugs pasted on rubbery CGI bodies, like the supposedly “state-of-the-art” equivalent of an old N64 sports game. The Electric State, by contrast, benefits from the smoothed surfaces and limited expressiveness of its digital creations. When Kid Cosmo first marches into the frame, you can see every moving component of his factory-assembled boots. And the relative simplicity of the designs – some of them lifted from Stålenhag’s artwork, most intended to resemble something that might greet you at the entrance of a roadside Big Boy restaurant – keeps the climactic Endgame-style battle sequence from devolving into blurry muck.

Of course, the very fact that there is a climactic battle sequence in this movie speaks to how thoroughly the Russos have Marvelized their source material, sanding down its weirder edges, reshaping it into something vaguely familiar and formulaic. About midway through the film, the cavalry is taken into a Southwest shopping mall sanctuary for robot survivors of the war, with Harrelson’s drawling, combat-hardened Mr. Peanut overseeing a makeshift Island of Misfit Toys. That’s the movie in, ahem, a nutshell: generic corporate mascots, pleading for our nostalgic affection when not slinging one-liners or preparing for battle. If there’s anything remotely personal about The Electric State, it lies in the ascribing of a soul to assembly-line corporate product… you know, like friendly automatons or the shiny popcorn pictures Martin Scorsese casually dismisses.

But there’s no ghost in the machine of The Electric State, which operates under the skittish assumption that any of the spooky melancholy of the book (or the kind the Russos smuggled into the opening minutes of Endgame) might tank its engagement metrics. Ideologically, it’s muddled to the point of incoherence: an anti-technology cautionary tale that wants you to cry for a bucket of bolts. Still, there’s some semblance of consistency to its anti-screen stance, its sermon about not getting too connected to your digital opiates. After all, Netflix is after a different kind of dystopian future, where movies aren’t so much a consuming addiction as bright, inconsequential background noise.

Death of a Unicorn opens in theaters Friday, March 28. This review is based on a screening at the 2025 SXSW Film and TV Festival.

There’s an intriguing premise with the potential for entertaining moral conundrums at the center of Death of a Unicorn. First, corporate lawyer Elliot Kintner (Paul Rudd) hits a mysterious creature. Then, when it turns out the animal’s corpse has healing powers, Elliot and his conscientious teenage daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega) must figure out how to hide the accident from Elliot’s wealthy pharmaceutical boss. Unfortunately, this synopsis is about as far, as deep, and as detailed as it gets for the latest horror comedy from indie powerhouse A24. Despite featuring a number of fun performances – especially that of Will Poulter as the pharma CEO’s wily failson – Alex Scharfman’s feature debut quickly plateaus.

Death of a Unicorn’s emotional throughlines all seem to end where they begin. In the opening scenes, Elliot and Ridley land in the Canadian mountains by plane; as the college teen falls asleep on her father’s shoulder, only for him to shimmy out of the way to grab fallen legal documents, causing her to hit her head on the armrest. It’s a wonderful, hilarious encapsulation of their estranged dynamic. Ridley’s mother has passed away; in response, Elliot threw himself into his work, irrevocably changing his relationship with Ridley. Now, with his ailing boss Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant) looking for a proxy before he dies, Elliot has the chance to set Ridley up for life, but on the condition that he prove himself a family man as well.

En route to the executive’s isolated mansion, the father-daughter duo, distracted by their bickering, mows down a white horse with a single horn – a creature the characters collectively, and reluctantly, decide to refer to as a unicorn. This leads to strange, fantastical happenings – including hypnotic visions and magical healing – but not before some delightful, human-on-apparent-unicorn violence intended to put the injured creature out of its misery. Its bright purple blood splatters everywhere, but the imperfectly realized CGI beast (forgivable, considering the ruckus it causes) isn’t quite dead, which further complicates Elliot’s already knotty interview with Odell.

This setup has all the makings of a story that evolves in delightful ways, but Death of a Unicorn never progresses past the (initially amusing) philosophical debates kicked off by the Leopolds’ discovery of their guests’ fairytale roadkill. It’s a conversation-heavy film until its creature-feature final act, but none of that jabbering changes the minds of anyone on screen – least of all Ridley, the film’s ostensible conscience. Ortega delivers a wonderfully lived-in performance as a baggily-dressed youth withdrawn from the world, defined entirely by her activist leaning. She’s an actor capable of injecting great thought and subtext into any scenario, but Death of a Unicorn is too flimsy even for her talents, rendering Ridley something of a blank slate who ends up so unwavering as to be grating. (It's a bad sign when the voice of reason and compassion in an attempted cinematic takedown of ruthless billionaires makes you consider siding with the billionaires.) Then again, what else is there to do than consider alternatives that the film and its characters do not, since all its drama, comedy, and thrills swiftly flatline.

Bearing the brunt of Ortega’s ire, the typically entertaining Rudd delivers an exceptionally plain, checked-out performance. And that’s a shame, considering the color the rest of the cast manages to bring to the screen: Grant is delightfully animated, as is Téa Leoni as Odell’s opportunistic wife. Jessica Hynes and Anthony Carrigan, meanwhile, add lively dimensions as the family’s stone-faced enforcer and fed-up butler. But it’s Poulter who comes closest to rescuing the film from its malaise. Nearly every line he delivers is hilarious, owing to how deftly and energetically he balances his character’s slimy scheming with the insecurities of someone who’s never made it on his own. He’s also the only actor whose performance seems to evolve or transform in any way, even if this is courtesy the drug-like properties of a magical substance.

There’s some amount of imagination at play, and A24 is hardly in the wrong for throwing its weight behind a first-time filmmaker. The unicorn’s designs are imaginative, as are its magical abilities – even if their discovery is rendered useless by characters making erratic choices, and losing their key motivations when convenient. Its horror elements tend to be inconsistent, especially in tone. While some sequences are meant to pay homage to Jurassic Park, the outcome tends to align with that film’s lesser reboot, Jurassic World: Cartoonish villains and complex, relatable characters alike suffer vicious deaths designed for our enjoyment and applause. As a result, some of the intended revelry feels icky.

Scharfman clearly has a knack for staging and blocking physical comedy, even if the way he actually captures it is lacking here. The eye is seldom drawn to what’s funniest, but rather, to what happens to be in the center of the frame. There’s also the ingenious conceit of the creature’s presence messing with electricity, which allows the film to seamlessly switch into haunted house mode when necessary. However, the tension and humor of these sequences don’t adequately rise and fall, and the editing is squeamish about what little cartoonish gore it features. This renders Death of a Unicorn a passive and ultimately tiring experience, one that gestures frequently towards fun and interesting ideas, but rarely follows through on them.

The Accountant opens in theaters on Friday, April 25. This review is based on a screening at the 2025 SXSW Film and TV Festival.

You can tell from the way the title is stylized on screen – as a mathematical exponent, like Alien³ – that The Accountant 2 has removed the self-seriousness from its predecessor’s otherwise delightful formula. Gavin O’Connor’s sequel is a blast, building on the story and relationships of 2016’s The Accountant to reveal a touching, hilarious portrait of fraught brotherhood within a charged and politically relevant plot. All the while, it leans full-tilt into a goofy setup that’s executed with utter confidence: Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck), a.k.a. The Accountant, is a savant number-cruncher for the mob and part-time vigilante gunman whose autism is gently approached and realistically performed, but framed as though it were a superpower.

There’s less bean counting in The Accountant 2, but far more blood and bullets, starting with an opening scene in which former Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (or FinCEN) director Raymond King (J.K. Simmons) is gunned down while working a case in secret. Once the Commissioner Gordon to The Accountant’s Batman – fitting, as Affleck and Simmons have since played that dynamic in the DC Extended Universe – King has only been following leads in which he’s emotionally invested. His death leaves behind an intricate puzzle for Wolff to solve, alongside King’s Treasury Department successor, the returning Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson). The case that got King killed opens up a web of human trafficking between Central America and the southern U.S., exposing the ways in which undocumented immigrants who have little legal recourse are brutally exploited. Where the first film was mostly unsentimental about its central plot (which revolved around a robotics firm), The Accountant 2 conjures immense sympathy with its topical melodrama and the mystery of King’s death.

But as somber as this story seems at first blush, it’s also peppered with wildly amusing moments of character. That begins with Wolff’s re-introduction, during which he games a speed-dating algorithm by sprucing up his profile in all the right ways, only to botch every face-to-face encounter. It’s the perfect kind of silly, placing Wolff’s isolation front and center while setting up his impending reunion with his estranged brother, fellow contract killer Braxton (Jon Bernthal), whose help he seeks to solve King’s murder. Also assisting Wolff is his returning, remote, technologically savvy assistant Justine (Allison Robertson, replacing Allison Wright from the first film), a nonverbal resident of a mansion-like academy for young autistic students. She has her own legion of hackers-in-training this time, à la Professor X – who she even quotes at one point. Like I said: perfectly silly, even if the portrayal of neurodivergence constantly threatens to tip (but never fully does) into offensiveness.

A mysterious, scarily capable assassin known only as Anaïs (Daniella Pineda) seems to somehow be involved in King’s case, but The Accountant 2’s lopsided structure ensures that she disappears for lengthy periods. However, the layers it reveals to her seemingly single-minded character do retroactively justify those absences. After all, this is the kind of movie where no matter how many conveniences cause its jigsaw pieces to click into place, the result is no less entertaining.

Just like The Accountant, whose heightened tone and reliance on tried-and-true storytelling devices – enormous coincidences, long-lost family connections – wouldn’t feel out of place in a Bollywood movie,the sequel similarly runs a crowd-pleasing gamut. The action is capable and clear. The plot, while complicated in structure, takes the characters to interesting places (both geographically and emotionally). The comedy is fine-tuned and, most importantly, entirely character-and-performance based.

Things simmer on a medium flame until Bernthal shows up and instantly sets the screen ablaze. An actor long compared to Robert De Niro, he finally gets his own “You talkin’ to me?” moment in The Accountant 2, which paves the path for Braxton’s surprising vulnerability – he’s a lost, lonely soul who just wants his older brother’s friendship. Affleck, despite a voice that seems more influenced by The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy this time around, returns seamlessly to the role of Wolff. Having retreated almost entirely to the solitude of his tricked-out Airstream trailer, he seems to want to connect as well, but his misreadings of his brother’s body language and intentions make this difficult. Braxton is frank and playful, and Bernthal imbues the character’s body language with an easy-going fluidity, which makes for an enchantingly funny contrast with Wolff’s unwavering stiffness.

The clashes between the brothers are the movie’s heart and soul – this especially comes to light during their downtime from vigilantism (and from Medina’s disapproval of their methods). One scene in an LA square dancing bar is a particular delight, between Braxton’s eagerness to throw hands, and Wolff’s wonderfully roundabout methods of flirtation, which involves him calculating his way onto the dance floor. It’s a sequence that demonstrates O’Connor understanding that movement and character are intrinsically bound, and in action cinema, you can’t really have one without building up the other.

The Accountant 2 is a surprisingly sentimental sequel, which keeps even the most scattered elements of its plot firmly glued together. It’s filled with the kind of unapologetic cheese that Hollywood action has long since replaced with irreverent, quippy snark, ensuring that its humor and drama go hand-in-hand at every turn, resulting in one of the year’s most well-rounded studio pictures.

Another Simple Favor streams on Prime Video beginning May 1. This review is based on a screening at the 2025 SXSW Film and Television Festival.

A sequel doesn’t have to be bigger, although many of them, including Another Simple Favor, choose to go this route. It doesn’t even have to be better, really, given the low expectations audiences historically have for follow-ups. What it has to be is more – specifically, more of whatever made the first film work well enough to justify a second one.

In the case of A Simple Favor, the thing that charmed audiences enough to bring in five times the budget was the effervescent chemistry between stars Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick (with some delicious bon mots and fabulous costume design as a bonus). The sequel delivers more of all these things: Kendrick is still tiny and spunky, the queen of the skeptical head tilt and sassy comeback. And Lively is still tall and unflappable, intriguing and intimidating at the same time.

The script gives them plenty of witty lines to volley back and forth, with enough left over for supporting players like Andrew Rannells, who tells his young daughter early in the film, “If you can’t be smart, be funny. If you can’t be funny, be pretty.” That’s typical of the script’s pithy, bitchy dialogue, written by returning screenwriter Jessica Sharzer along with Altered Carbon creator Laeta Kalogridis.

Another Simple Favor takes the action to Italy, where Emily (Lively) and Stephanie (Kendrick) reunite at the former’s wedding on the stunning island of Capri. At risk of spoilers, the natural question here is, “Didn’t Emily go to jail at the end of the last movie?” Yes, and true to the movie’s tongue-in-cheek tone, that’s explained away with a single line after Emily stomps back into Stephanie’s life in a pair of rhinestone-studded stiletto boots. Stephanie owes Emily – you guessed it – another favor, given the whole “sending her to prison after having sex with her husband, and then writing a book about it” thing.

Henry Golding is back as Emily’s errant now-ex-spouse, and his (unfortunately brief, for reasons best not explained here) appearance in the film is a comedic highlight. Weddings also bring family members back into the fold, and Allison Janney joins the cast as Emily’s estranged aunt Linda, who’s more conniving and dangerous than she appears. And of course there must be a husband, and Michele Morrone does his duty being hunky and a little scary as Emily’s betrothed Dante, who’s the heir to a massive fortune no one wants to talk about. (The Mafia. It’s the Mafia.)

Dante is using Emily, Emily is using Stephanie, Aunt Linda is obviously up to something, and bodies keep appearing in inconvenient places as this cutthroat crew prepares for the big day. One innovation Another Simple Favor brings to its Agatha Christie-esque plot is arranging events in a way that wrests them out of Emily’s control, and observing the shifts in her character and motivation that follow that change. This means that Stephanie is also out of control, which she hates, although her intelligence means that she’s never behind the curve for long.

There are a few too many plot threads for all of them to pay off – a subplot involving single mom Stephanie’s son Miles (Joshua Satine), conveniently away at a no-phones-allowed summer camp, goes nowhere, for example. And the film’s attempts to outdo its predecessor in intrigue are absurd in a way that’s sometimes fun, and sometimes off-puttingly bizarre. But this is Italy, birthplace of the giallo film. And intentionally or not, Another Simple Favor’s more lurid psychosexual twists are true to that particular genre.

If the plot escalations are variable, one area where bigger is unilaterally worse for Another Simple Favor is in the camerawork. Director Paul Feig is known for long takes designed not to interfere with his actors’ performances, and his lack of finesse with more complicated sequences is obvious in haphazardly assembled drone shots that sweep over the dramatic cliffs of Capri. This wouldn’t be that big of a deal, except that there are a lot of them, and they’re all nauseating.

Better to concentrate on what works: The performances, the script, and the costumes. Oh, the costumes. The contrast between Lively and Kendrick’s wardrobes tells you everything you need to know about their characters, with Lively’s breathtakingly luxe menswear-inspired ensembles contrasting with Kendrick’s momcore jean shorts and worn-out hoodies. She does get to wear some pretty dresses at the wedding festivities, in scenes that are smorgasbords of moneyed excess and natural splendor. Throw some slick Italo-pop on top, and you’ve got a piece of escapist entertainment that’s more clever than most. So what if it doesn’t always make sense?